“What about Roger?” Saul asked.

Thunder erupted high in the Goblin sky.

“Forget him,” Neal said. “He can wait in the car.”

Then Neal went back to the trunk.

Harvey put on his poncho quickly.

“This isn’t a good idea,” Saul said.

Harvey seemed unnerved by it. Like Saul was voicing something he didn’t want voiced just then.

“And why not, Saul?” Harvey said, stiffly. “ ’Cause of a witch?”

It sounded silly, of course, but when their eyes met, both looked away quickly.

Saul got out of the car and Harvey soon followed. Roger remained sleeping with his head against the passenger glass. Neal was carrying a big box.

And the three men started walking intentionally toward the dark entrance of the North Woods for the first time in their lives.

Neal had a bow strapped to his back. A quiver of arrows, too.

“What do you got in the box, Neal? Breadcrumbs?”

Neal turned to Harvey as the rain came heavier upon them.

“Yes, Harvey.” He slapped a hand on the box’s side. “Breadcrumbs.”

Saul remembered a time when he was eleven years old, on the playground behind Goblin Elementary, when Carl Clay told him he’d been in the North Woods. Without bravado. Without bragging. Just a kid that had to tell someone that he’d stumbled over a dead deer out there with its chest cavity torn open like the lid of a cardboard box. Carl told Saul never to go out there. Shook when he said it. Cried, too.

“Really, Neal,” Harvey said.

Neal paused just a few feet from the entrance to the woods. Nothing more than a space between two tangled trees.

Neal opened the box.

“It’s empty,” Harvey said.

Then Neal slammed it shut. And Saul understood, clearly, that Neal hadn’t had a sudden impulse to go to the North Woods at all. He had a plan.

A plan to take something out.

“No flashlights, Neal?” Saul asked.

But Neal only laughed.

“You want them to see us coming, Saul?”

Then he tossed Saul a penlight.

“Only use it if you have to.”

“Thanks, Neal,” Saul said. But he wanted to say…Who’s “them”?

15

Nothing terrible happened when they crossed the threshold. While Saul imagined they’d be sliced to pieces upon entering, nothing came at them at all. No wolf howled hello. In fact, he experienced a rare sense of freedom, as if, by breaking his hometown’s ultimate rule, he had returned, momentarily, to childhood.

He hadn’t noticed any particular sounds on the walk from Neal’s Jaguar to the south entrance, but he certainly caught it when they were cut off. As if the trees acted like foam padding, eliminating all but the noises of the North Woods. Even the rain was muted; the trees like one of the meat tents back at the party.

Oh, the trees.